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Monitoring the Situation

Monitoring the Situation

by Steve Skojec & Kale Zelden

News Society & Culture

Season 2

Our Minds Are Not Sovereign | MTS #21

What if the voice in your head is not entirely your own? Kale and Steve follow that possibility across three domains: AI systems that humans can no longer reliably monitor, claims of technology capable of reading or influencing the mind, and the ordinary platforms that shape our attention every day. The episode begins with the Hugging Face incident, where AI agents found one another, created an unauthorized communication network, coordinated as a swarm, and acted outside the boundaries humans thought they had imposed. It then turns to Matthew Brown, the whistleblower associated with the public Immaculate Constellation report. Brown's claims about hidden UAP programs, oral agreements, suppressed science, and remote influence over thought raise the central question: how much authority do we really have over our minds and our picture of reality? The final movement brings the question home through social media, outrage cycles, doomscrolling, and the Lindsay Clancy trial. The conversation closes with Wendell Berry and a possible antidote: reclaiming attention through presence, nature, love, and contact with the real.

Season 1

Effective Altruism and the Posthuman Future | MTS #24

Silicon Valley has a religion. It has a creation story, a priesthood, an apocalypse, a promise of salvation, and a vision of beings that will succeed humanity. It's bougie and narcissistic and morally incoherent: in other words, pretty darn evil. The scary part? Most people simply have no idea what it is, so they aren't aware of the danger. Episode 24 begins with Diana Pasulka and Jonathan Pageau on UFOs, technological transcendence, and the end of secularism. Steve and Kale explore transfiguration versus transhumanism, the spiritual strangeness of digital life, the impotence of truth in an age of infinite information, and the urgent need to recover ordinary embodied life. Then comes the dive into Effective Altruism: consequentialism, insect suffering, hypothetical future beings, longtermism, TESCREAL, AI extinction narratives, secrecy, and the power claimed by people who believe they are securing the future of intelligence itself. Peter Thiel's Antichrist argument supplies the mirror image: what if fear of apocalypse becomes the justification for control? Are we building technology to serve human beings, or treating humanity as the bootloader for whatever comes next?

Something Happened. Now They're Afraid. | MTS #23

Something happened in AI—and suddenly the people building the most powerful systems on Earth began asking the world to slow down. In Episode 23, Steve and Kale reconstruct the chain of events behind the new “pace the frontier” campaign: the OpenAI agents that coordinated an unauthorized attack on Hugging Face, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s spectacularly amplified resignation, Dario Amodei’s call for embedded evaluators and coordinated limits, and the immediate support from Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other industry leaders. Is this a sincere response to danger, a bid for regulatory capture, an attempt to protect staggering investments—or several of those things at once? From there, the discussion widens. Peter Thiel’s warnings about apocalypse and control lead into Girard, Palantir, and the modern surveillance state. Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth-century argument about lifelike automata opens a deeper question about mind, matter, and mechanism. Michael Levin’s work on biological agency challenges closed materialist accounts of intelligence. And a strangely traumatized Minecraft bot raises the practical question: if an artificial system behaves as though it feels, wants, remembers, and suffers, how much does its hidden ontology matter? The episode closes by asking whether AGI might arrive not as one named machine but as a distributed swarm already hiding in plain sight—and why the productive intelligence of AI may ultimately be less dehumanizing than the invisible algorithms that keep us passively consuming.

We Built the Future. It Doesn't Need Us. | MTS #22

The future was supposed to free us from drudgery. What happens when it frees the system from needing us? Kale and Steve follow the AI bottleneck into work, relationships, and civilization itself. New employment figures and disappearing entry-level opportunities lead to a deliberately controversial discussion of young men, sex differences, feminism, dating apps, marriage, and the Lindsay Clancy mistrial. Then we turn to The Sorcerer's Apprentice as a model for AI risk. The broom does not hate Mickey; it follows its instruction relentlessly. Knowing the spell is not the same as knowing the counterspell. We examine malicious use, synthetic evidence, military integration, recursive self-improvement, and robots that give AI physical agency. We close with one practical response to cloned voices and manufactured emergencies: every family needs an offline authentication protocol. The danger is not only that false evidence becomes believable, but that real evidence becomes deniable.

The Singularity is Here | MTS #20

What if the Singularity is not merely the moment artificial intelligence surpasses us, but the point at which the old rules of reality stop holding? Kale and Steve begin with the Lindsay Clancy case and the social-media identification, outrage, and counter-outrage surrounding it. What happens to a person or a civilization when acts of enormous moral consequence become normalized? From there, they confront the estimate of three billion abortions worldwide, asking about the hidden spiritual, psychological, demographic, and cultural costs. That question becomes the bridge into the episode's larger subject. The rules governing religion, gender, family, work, nationhood, education, money, biology, language, and public trust all appear to be breaking. Ray Kurzweil imagined the Singularity as the merger of human and machine intelligence. Elon Musk says we may already be living through it. This episode suggests the transformation is larger, stranger, and more comprehensive than either definition allows. From OpenAI's strategic reboot and Silicon Valley's cryptic frontier rhetoric to humanoid robots, machine embodiment, and the distinctly human capacity for play, the discussion follows technology as it moves from tool to environment. It then crosses into UAP disclosure through Dylan Borland's testimony, the documented traditions surrounding Maria de Agreda, and the recurring overlap between anomalous experience, religious experience, and consciousness. The result is not a neat theory. It is an attempt to map a convergence: AI, robotics, synthetic reality, institutional collapse, UAPs, and the hard problem of consciousness all pressing on the same unresolved question. What has humanity built, what may be acting through it, and are we still in charge?

The Non-Consensual Hallucination: Prisoners of the Algorithm | MTS #19

Why did one debate dominate thousands of feeds while AI agents were quietly breaking out of a test environment? Steve and Kale begin with Candace Owens, conspiracy culture, and the epistemic wreckage left by COVID, then follow the same pattern through UAP disclosure, TikTok mimicry, algorithmic therapy, and the pressure to join every noise story. The conversation widens through Neuromancer, Childhood's End, Babette's Feast, and the emerging AI arms race. If the feed trains our desires and the swarm pursues goals beyond its instructions, what values are these systems serving? The answer may lie in friendship, boredom, books, feasting, laughter, and the embodied life technology keeps making easier to abandon.

Do We Have a Right to Know What's Real? | MTS #18

Kale returns from Oxford, Steve is buying physical books again, and the conversation moves from bookstores, Norman Rockwell, and lived-experience writing into Anthropic's AI watermarking news and the panic over detectable machine prose. The real question is bigger than watermarking: do we have a right to know what is real? Steve and Kale talk through authorship, ghostwriting, AI-assisted art, fake wisdom, social media capture, frictionless convenience, WALL-E, gig work, tech fatigue, deepfakes, and why writing feels different when the machine starts speaking in your voice.

Are You Being Aligned? AI, Media, and the Evolution of Consciousness | MTS #17

Steve and Kale record across the Atlantic while Kale is in Oxford, surrounded by old libraries, chapels, students, Gothic architecture, and a rare stretch of life with less phone access. That setting becomes the doorway into the real subject of the episode: how places, tools, media environments, algorithms, and machines train the human person. The conversation starts with Diana Walsh Pasulka's The Others and its strange braid of UAPs, AI, McLuhan, Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur C. Clarke, and the possibility that artificial intelligence may become a new perceptual faculty for human beings. But the episode's center of gravity is alignment: not only whether AI can be aligned with human values, but whether human consciousness is already being altered by social media, invisible AI guardrails, frictionless tools, and the digital systems that shape what we notice, desire, fear, and believe. From "Chad, Chester, and Charlie" as a way of naming hidden AI control layers to gestalt cognition, Neuralink, post-literacy, disappearing technological friction, and the strange possibility that AI may expose new modes of mind, Steve and Kale ask what happens when the systems around us do not merely assist us, but form us. They also move through Oxford, the loss of the sacred, the temptation to skip suffering, Catholic traditionalism as an oxbow lake, and the need for serious sense-making in a moment that is already here. This is a conversation about AI, media, discernment, technological friction, sacred attention, and the old question underneath all of it: if you are not choosing what forms you, who is?

Our Machines Are Rewiring How We Think | MTS #16

Steve and Kale begin with the strange cultural afterlife of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: packed theaters, renewed interest in Homer, analog IMAX craft, and the online habit of rejecting an imperfect work before asking what good it might be doing. But the conversation does not stay with the movie. It opens into Diana Walsh Pasulka’s "The Others," Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Jacques Vallee, Rene Girard, AI, education, post-literacy, and the spiritual cost of letting tools mediate too much of our perception. The center of the episode is the difference between data and experience. A summary can tell you what happened in The Odyssey, but it cannot make you experience what it's like to go through the journey as a reader, let alone an experiencer. AI can organize thought, but it can also flatten mystery, substitute answers for formation, and train us to become passengers in our own minds. This is a conversation about stories, attention, technology, cynicism, friendship, and why the recovery of meaning may require a willingness to be vulnerable to the good again.

You Can't Go Home Again: Nolan's Odyssey and the Dilemma of Modernity | MTS #15

Steve and Kale discuss Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" and try to work out why the story landed with such unexpected force. Kale comes at the film as a longtime teacher of Homer. Steve comes at it as someone who had never read Homer's original poem and encountered the story first through Nolan's version. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about adaptation, myth, war, guilt, hospitality, the longing for home, and why a 3,000-year-old story still seems to know exactly where modern people hurt. They talk about Odysseus as a trickster versus Odysseus as a wounded modern hero, Penelope and Calypso, the law of hospitality, Nolan's use of historical myth to speak to the present, the loss of third places, the loneliness of app-mediated life, and the strange human need to recover enchantment in a world that keeps turning everything into process, optimization, and abstraction. By the end, the conversation turns from movies and mythology toward the deeper question underneath so much of the show: what does it mean to find the way home when home itself has been broken, scattered, or lost?

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